Posted
by
timothy
on Friday June 10, 2011 @10:34AM
from the ooh-baby-let's-meet-again-in-2d-life dept.

jfruhlinger writes "If you've used Facebook or Twitter, you're almost certainly familiar with 'bimbots' — accounts that have profile pics of attractive women, but seem to exist only to send send spam links with varying degrees of subtlety. Henry Copeland, the founder of BlogAds, tracks the social network of one such Facebook bot, and finds that she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks. Copeland also tracks down the origin of the photo that accompanies the account."

Now for me to be lured in, there would have to be regular posts, with pics, about things like:

"Washed my car in a bikini top and Daisy Duke shorts today. Got all wet. Tee hee!;-)""Took some pics on my sportbike while I was outside.""Had this fruit freezy at lunch today. Tastes so good. See how much I enjoy it? Mmmmmm....""How do these new shoes look? Ignore the very short skirt, just look at the shoes.""Decided to drop rose petals on my bed and pose

Executives are not very computer savvy. And this is a surprise because....

Well, TFA is Slashdotted, but TFS seems to indicate that these are tech bigwigs.

If the executives of your tech company aren't computer savvy... then maybe the reason your business is in the shitter is because your executives don't understand what it is that you do because they're a bunch of MBAs who don't know your industry well enough.

I'm sorry, but if you're running a tech company, you have no excuse for not being computer savvy.

You can run a tech company and not be computer savvy, provided you have the ability to keep investors continue to leave their wallets open. This was true in the dot.com bubble, and still true today, although it takes a far glibber tongue to keep investors shelling out the cash than in the past where scraping "LINUX" on something meant a multi million dollar IPO.

You can run a tech company and not be computer savvy, provided you have the ability to keep investors continue to leave their wallets open.

Of course. I think what Parent was saying is that better than this philosophy you identify is to implement an ethos of doing the job well. As this case illustrates, that would have been a better approach to take than focusing on "keeping investors' wallets open." Funnily enough, doing the job well is often a better approach, no matter what your jaded perspective on American commercialism may be (which actually feeds into the corrupt mentality of faking goods to get money).

Long term, doing the job well is the better approach. However, being in the industry so long, it is easy to get cynical, after bids/proposals for doing a job right get shoved off the table for ones that are cheaper, regardless of potential cost in safety, security, or long term sustainability.

I have consulted at a number of startups. The #1 thing that was the focus was keeping the investor wallets open. Everything else, up to and including making a solid product came second.

But of course what's more likely is that these facebook pages are not in any way personal pages. They will be maintained by some corporate minion who has a dozen other more important things to be doing for their boss, and who just accepts all friend requests. No-one seriously believes that they're "friends", even by facebook standards.

Chances are that these people, if they have a personal facebook page at all, keep it well under wraps.

I'm not so sure, actually. Some of the absolute worst PHB's I've ever had the misfortune to work with, weren't MBA types, but former brilliant coders. They're the guys who thought they're still expert enough to take tech decisions by themselves, just because they once coded some clever calculations in FORTRAN and subscribe to some IT-for-managers ragazine. The fact that a lot still had the typical nerd personality of just having to be right about everything, and taking even the theoretical possibility of th

Yeah, but also for a lot of people the number of "friends" they have on some list, is some kind of self-validation and status symbol.

To understand what I'm about to say, I must mention Dunbar's Number [wikipedia.org], which mans basically for a given species, how many relationships you can juggle around in your head. For Homo Sapiens that's a little under 150. The most primitive tribes can work without any form of organization below that number, for example, by simple virtue of everyone being friends with everyone else in

At first, I didn't even have a FB profile. However, when interviewing, I was looked at like I was an alien, or one of those weird hermits who doesn't have a phone or electricity.

So I created a dummy FB account. Then started using it to reconnect with acquaintances. The same HR people who demanded friends with FB were doing so because it was the "in" thing as per their magazines. None of them ever mentioned that they were not seeing the full profile.

Interesting -- thanks! I have a FB profile that's pretty minimal, and have assiduously avoided friending those above me in the hierarchy although I know other folks who do not. I work in higher education (not a prof, a lowly staff person) and would have been aghast at having been told I needed to as a condition of employment--and am surprised that HR people would use a vehicle that might give them access to information like familial status, religion, etc. that could get them sued.

If these people are influential or media folks as it says, then they probably have tons of requests all the time. They are "important" people that love to be heard. The more followers/friends/whatever they have the better. They aren't going to spend a lot of time sifting through the requests to see who's real or not.

In fairness, a significant part of their jobs as corporate executives is to be heard by as many people as possible. Not to mention that by virtue of their jobs they most likely meet hundreds, if not thousands of people every year. This whole thing is kind of ridiculous; they're public figures, their use cases for Facebook are different from the average person. Where I would recommend to most people that they personally know every person on their friends list, that advice doesn't make sense for people usi

I'm pretty sure most of these bigwigs are not actually managing their own social network profile, and that the Public Relations drone or Image Consultant who runs it for them is under instructions to accept all friend requests.

Any hint of normal human sexuality should be crushed immediately and the person in question must be publicly humiliated. The Bible tells us that our only source of pleasure should be giving money to churches and praying on bloody knees.

[Citation Needed]

I know you are just pointing out the hypocrisy of American culture which pushes sex in advertisements and media, but then publicly scorns any and every public figure who allows the fact that they aren't complete asexual prudes to become common knowledge. You're right about that. However, you are mistaking the way Western culture -- particularly American culture -- has interpreted the Bible with what it really says. Anyone who thinks that the Bible teaches that sex is always evil shoul

Any hint of normal human sexuality should be crushed immediately and the person in question must be publicly humiliated. The Bible tells us that our only source of pleasure should be giving money to churches and praying on bloody knees.

[Citation Needed]

I know you are just pointing out the hypocrisy of American culture which pushes sex in advertisements and media, but then publicly scorns any and every public figure who allows the fact that they aren't complete asexual prudes to become common knowledge. You're right about that. However, you are mistaking the way Western culture -- particularly American culture -- has interpreted the Bible with what it really says. Anyone who thinks that the Bible teaches that sex is always evil should really try reading it sometime. I'd recommend starting with Song of Solomon [biblegateway.com] and also 1 Corinthians 7:3-4 [biblegateway.com]. In Genesis 1:28 [biblegateway.com], God is reported to have said to people, "Be fruitful and multiply." Any idea how they were supposed to do that without sex? Then, Genesis 2:25 [biblegateway.com] says that "They were naked and NOT ashamed(!)"

And Genesis 2:25 was in the Garden of Eden, and prior to the original sin/fall of man. It is followed by Genesis 3:7 [biblegateway.com]: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves."

Seriously, trying to use Genesis 2:25 to say that humans shouldn't be ashamed to be naked is like saying that lions and lambs should lay down to sleep together. According to Christian theology, that no longer applies to the world.

The problem with saying something like that is that Christians, as a whole, are a lot like/. as a whole: there is no such thing. Here on/., there are liberals, libertarians and conservatives. There are atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Islamics, and pagans. There are Windows fanboys, Mac fanboys, and Linux fanboys. Likewise, saying that "Christians believe ${theology}" is an oversimplification.

And Genesis 2:25 was in the Garden of Eden, and prior to the original sin/fall of man. It is followed by Genesis 3:7 [biblegateway.com]: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves."

Yes, I was stretching a bit to use Genesis 2:25 in my point above, but I maintain that I wasn'

When I see stuff like this I get instantly suspicious and for good reason. Most services that cater to single men wanting companionship are so flooded with fake profiles of hot girls, spam links, etc. that I begin to associate a hot girl with someone who just wants something from me, be it attention, money, or just to screw with me.
Want this kind of thing to stop? Then don't take the bait. Don't give these attention whores and/or spammers what they want. Just pretend they don't exist and they'll go aw

Advertisements and spam will only go away if the cost to the originator damages his business case. Ignoring the problem is an attempt at symptomatic relief, and does nothing about the root cause of the problem.

It's all well and good that your high-profile execs just want that 'social publicity' and let their admins run it for them. Until their admins accept these spam-bot contacts and then wind up getting socially engineered into released important/sensitive/confidential information, like passwords.

Then what happens is you have Sony, you have Citi, and you have numerous other smaller gaffes that I don' t really need to enumerate here.

You want publicity, fine... but make it a one way road. Don't even give

You know, a lot of celebrities accept all friend requests. It sort of doesn't matter, because they know not to put important info on their page. And isn't 697 a low number of friends for a spambot? You can have 5,000 friends.

Slow news day. I don't think 'friends' in Facebook terms means what the author supposes (or hopes). Personally I think Facebook should never have used and abused the word 'friend'. But 'acquaintance' is a bit unwieldy and still not accurate. 'Connection'? Anyway, 'friend' just doesn't work IMHO.

If you're talking about Facebook: to get information on/from them.In the process of "friending" them you can choose to put them on a friends list where they can't see anything on you and your relationships that's not already on your public profile, while you can see everything they allow to their facebook friends - e.g. who their friends are, photos of them, wall posts etc.

That way you can do stuff like figure out who the person might be. There are people who put cartoon characters or random pics as their d